Like a coin spent on tavern wine. Though hard metal of manufactured essence, it disappears into nothing more than Port that is imbibed, a moment of lingering flavor, then nothing.

Or wax. Melting, feeding a glow, but before dawn, all that wax, the cotton wick, and the glow itself, are gone.

My name is dead.

But it is irrefutable that I have an origin. For here I stand. And so I take the name of my origin, Arbanville, a small estate once north of Andorhol, now lost forever. A victim of the wars, of the Scourge, of circumstance. Like me.

My name is Darbanville.

I choose to remember nothing before the time dear Zauber roused me from my torpor. Aye, like most of you, I was awakened by the Dark Lady, in her bid of usurping power for herself. But being awake is not living.

Zauber, a stranger to me before then, found me, lying lost in the Undercity Inn, and whispered these odd words (I recall them so clearly) to me:

“My lady d’Arbanville why does it grieve me so? But your heart seems so silent. Why do you breathe so low, why do you breathe so low?”

Those words uplifted me, and gave me purpose. Not so much the words as those whose lips uttered them. So that I now know I have enough life to tell you, Zauber, and the rest of you, and the Dark Lady herself, “This rose will never die.”